An epigram often flashes light into regions where reason shines but dimly. – Edwin P. Whipple, lecture delivered before the Boston Mercantile Library Associa

The adventitious beauty of poetry may be felt in the greater delight which a verse gives in happy quotation than in the poem. – Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Art”

Then your words of abuse today may turn into a universally valid principle of denigration, for words are magical formulae. They leave fingermarks behind on the brain, which in the twinkling of an eye becomes the footprints of history. One ought to watch one’s every word. – Franz Kafka, quoted by Gustav Janouch, Conversations with Kafka